Category Archives: English

What do do with your summer after a week at home and the temptation to scream aloud, ‘I’m boooooored!’? Why not escape to a new world, a new country in a different part of the world, a different time period? Why not live the life of a spy, a rebel, a prince, or a Harvard symbologist? Where can you do all these things? Those of you who’ve been paying attention will know the answer already. Books, of course!

The Summer Reading Challenge takes place every year here in the UK across the country and allows you to chart your progress with reading and foster great habits that will sustain you over a lifetime of great reading. All you have to do is go to your local library, register, and read six books of your choice. Every two books that you read, you go back, talk to someone at the library about the books you’ve read and take out two more, receiving cool, free stuff as you go along and with a bigger prize and celebrations around the country at the end of the summer.

If it sounds a bit daunting, don’t worry. Librarians and Reading Challenge volunteers are ready to help you choose books that appeal to your interests and to your reading ability that you will enjoy and find inspiring. And if you are a confident reader, love books and are between 11-24, you can volunteer to help with the Summer Reading Challenge.

‘After nourishment, shelter and companionship, stories are the thing we need most in the world.’ Philip Pullman, author of His Dark Materials and The Sally Lockhart Mysteries

Here in the English Department at King Solomon High School, we subscribe wholly to Pullman’s words about stories. They’re important. They can have a profound effect on people. They can move worlds.

This is why it’s so important to recognise the creative writing talent blossoming in our students. Below is a video made by our Head of English, Mr Mukherjee, for year 8 prize day this year, showcasing some of the fantastic work done by our students. Have a look and leave a comment. It is pretty astounding.

Wouldn’t it be exciting to be able to have an ongiong discussion of the skills, concepts and great books that we study in English Language and Literature, a discussion in which you could share your insights on poetry, on novels, on the great and pressing issues facing us today, and engage with and develop your critical thinking skills through the thoughts and ideas of others?

This ongoing discussion is the impetus behind starting The King Solomon English Blog. It is hoped of course that it will be useful for you as a learning tool and that we will provide tips and advice, share useful links, alert you to important English-related events, and hopefully challenge you to expand your horizons.

But it is also important that this functions as a forum both for discussion and for recognition of some of the immense writing and reading talent in King Solomon and the ways in which written expression can be used to move and to inspire to greatness and the ways in which the pages we study in class can come to life and create forests of dreams and oceans of vision on which we can build ideas of the future.

Here’s hoping you are ready to join in the discussion and have your voice heard!